The funny thing is I was doing some back of the napkin calculations back in the day, and got pretty dang close. Think I was guessing around 7 trillion was on the table in bailout money, and TARP was just a red hearing. I was kind of hoping that was just a bad guess on my part, but turns out it was right on the money (give or take a trillion or so).

That they were that crazy, or that busted, to leverage half the U.S. GDP to save a bunch of private banks (not even good banks); yet, they refused to bail out home owners (that logic and even a few sane economist where saying if you save the homes, you save the economy).

That article at one point say jpmorgan got a loan that was equal 10% of all the outstanding home mortgages in the United States. Seriously? They could not have just snatched up all the mortgages floating around, and pulled the whole mess out of the fire, for way less than 7 trillion dollars.

Yea, I know there was a lot of other things going on that where too "complex" for average Joe the Plumbers and myself to understand (dam it Jim, I am just a Philosopher with no qualifications at all to analyze what is truth or reality).

That was exactly the problem. Smoke and mirrors under false complexities, and anything sufficiently understandable was made a State Secret. You know, kind of like the Chinese Central Committee makes embarrassing things State secrets.

The U.S. banks were broke. All of them. They were all bankrupt. Every Single American Financial institution of any significant size was Illiquid between 2007-2009.

Which leads us to the next brain teaser. At some point in that mess, essentially the U.S. dollar was completely worthless (just no one knew it). It was completely worthless because for all intensive purposes the U.S. Gov had more on the line than it had assets or potential assets liquid to cover the all in bet being made by the Fed or that the U.S. economy could cover. Rather Argentina of them.

So, how about now?

Now, we don't know that they are in any better shape than in 2007 or 2008. There is every indication that they kicked it down the road to possibly the first quarter or half of 2012 (some feds are saying 50% chance of entering a recession again). We are going to find out just how much it will cost, globally. They turned a regional real estate market bubble pop in to a global thermal nuclear meltdown.

This opinion piece by Dean Baker may give FED bashers a justifiable "I told you so" moment; however, as indicated, it was the incompetence of Greenspan (and the FED's board fof governors) who didn't see the clear early warning signals and, therefore, FED policy was not modified in an attempt to prevent the 2008 financial crisis. Poor Greenspan, he actually believed that markets were self-regulating ... too many years spent sitting on the lap of Ayn Rand.

" Poor Greenspan, he actually believed that markets were self-regulating ... too many years spent sitting on the lap of Ayn Rand."

Well, eh..... yes they do. But since when was there a free market? he was working for the government and trying to control money and markets. Ayn Rand made it quite clear that those in bed with the government would not succeed.

BUT, maybe he was so smart that he was trying to bring the system down from within, like some have opined

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